Dr Juliane Kaminski and her dog, Ambula

Domestic dogs are much more likely to steal food when they think nobody can see them, suggesting for the first time they are capable of understanding a human’s point of view.

Many dog owners think their pets are clever or that they understand humans but, until now, this has not been tested by science.

Dr Juliane Kaminski, of the University of Portsmouth’s Department of Psychology, has shown that when a human forbids a dog from taking food, dogs are four times more likely to disobey in a dark room than a lit room, suggesting they take into account what the human can or cannot see.

Dr Kaminski said: “That’s incredible because it implies dogs understand the human can’t see them, meaning they might understand the human perspective.”

This is the first study to examine if dogs differentiate between different levels of light when they are developing strategies on whether to steal food. It is published in the journal Animal Cognition. The research was funded by the Max Planck Society, Dr Kaminski’s former employer.

Dr Kaminski said: “Humans constantly attribute certain qualities and emotions to other living things. We know that our own dog is clever or sensitive, but that’s us thinking, not them.

“These results suggest humans might be right, where dogs are concerned, but we still can’t be completely sure if the results mean dogs have a truly flexible understanding of the mind and others’ minds. It has always been assumed only humans had this ability.”

The research is an incremental step in our understanding of dogs’ ability to think and understand which could, in turn, be of use to those who work with dogs, including the police, the blind and those who use gun dogs, as well as those who keep them as pets.

Dr Kaminski ran a series of experiments in varied light conditions. In each test, a dog was forbidden by a human from taking the food. When the room was dark, the dogs took more food and took it more quickly than when the room was lit.

The tests were complex and involved many variables to rule out that dogs were basing their decisions on simple associative rules, for example, that dark means food.

There is no evidence on how well dogs can see in the dark, but the results of this research show dogs can differentiate between light and dark.

Dr Kaminski said: “The results of these tests suggest that dogs are deciding it’s safer to steal the food when the room is dark because they understand something of the human’s perspective.”

Dogs’ understanding may be limited to the here and now, rather than on any higher understanding, Dr Kaminski said, and more research is needed to identify what mechanisms are controlling dogs’ behaviour.

In total, 42 female and 42 male domestic dogs aged one year or older took part in the tests. They were chosen only if they were comfortable without their owners in the room, even in complete darkness, and if they were interested in food. “Some dogs are more interested in by food than others,” Dr Kaminski said.

Previous studies have shown chimpanzees have a sophisticated understanding and seem to know when someone else can or can’t see them and can also remember what others have seen in the past. It is not known how sophisticated dogs’ understanding is in comparison. Many earlier research papers have found that, for dogs, a human’s eyes are an important signal when deciding how to behave, and that they respond more willingly to attentive humans, than inattentive ones.

Humour is ‘social glue’ for police and ambulance crews

Black humour, drawn from shared experiences, helps ‘glue’ ambulance crews and police officers together, with firefighters likely to be on the receiving end of the jokes, according to new research.

Dr Sarah Charman, of the University of Portsmouth’s Institute of Criminal Justice Studies, examined the role of dark humour in the workplace of ambulance crews and police officers and found it provides comfort and creates a bond that crosses the occupational divide.

She said: “Emergency workers frequently find themselves in unpleasant and unpredictable situations at odds with the heroic status and image presented in television dramas.

“They regularly deal with death or near-death. They face messy and mortifying situations the rest of us never have to encounter.”

Dr Sarah Charman

Humour acts as social glue and what makes one person laugh can make someone else recoil, she said. Shared humour requires a degree of shared experience.

“By normalising a situation through humour, a stressful encounter can be made more manageable – humour allows people to control feelings of fear or vulnerability,” she said.

“For these people, it is often a case of if you didn’t laugh, you’d cry. Both have a tension-reducing effect but it’s not socially acceptable for professionals doing their job to cry.”

The unexpected finding of the research was that while all three emergency services enjoy a camaraderie and mutual respect, firefighters are often not included and are even the target of jokes, being referred to as ‘water fairies’ and ‘drip stands’.

According to the research findings, which incorporated the views of 45 ambulance staff and police officers, firefighters ‘sleep on the job’, ‘are fed on the job’, ‘cut car roofs off unnecessarily’ and ‘hose away vital evidence’. The fact firefighters tend to be held in high esteem by the public, especially women, was also mentioned.

One police officer said: “You could say we’re not ramming it down people’s throats that we rescued a cat out of a tree.”

The humour directed at firefighters was, nonetheless, seen as light-hearted banter and, as one ambulance crew member said: “Ultimately, we are all protective of each other, we just don’t like to admit it.”

Dr Charman said one of the reasons for the apparent divide might be ambulance crew and police officers have more in common. Although their role and function is ultimately very different, both have jobs that rely on patient, calm communication skills.

She said: “What makes academics marking undergraduate essays laugh; what makes shop assistants dealing with customers laugh; and what makes ambulance crews and police officers dealing with the public laugh is culturally defined – it is based on shared experiences at work and the nature of the work.

“Risque humour demands a high degree of trust and confidence between colleagues and has the potential to be career threatening, but the humour between ambulance crews and police officers is seen by them as unremittingly positive.”

The camaraderie emerged on the job. In interviews they used phrases about the other which included, ‘in tune with’, ‘like-minded’, ‘have a natural affinity with’, ‘reciprocal respect’, ‘friendly’ and ‘fun’.

Shared gallows humour was the single most important factor in the work they did together and was mentioned by nearly all those interviewed, who described it as ‘inappropriate’, ‘warped’, ‘bizarre’ and ‘slightly sick’. Both parties also described a tacit mutual understanding, an unspoken agreement to not use such humour with friends, family or members of the public.

Dr Charman said a mutually defined ‘joke book’ written for and by members reinforces combined cultural identity; acts as glue in a way outsiders might see as trivial; helps build a strong reliance on each other’s skills and qualities in difficult situations; and fosters a strong degree of trust and rapport.

She added that further research was needed to give a voice to the firefighters, to understand their position within this tripartite relationship.

The research is published in the International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy.

Professor Mike Tipton

Scientists at the University of Portsmouth are looking into why more athletes die during the swim compared to the cycling or running sections of a triathlon. They also want to know why these swimmers die during the competition itself but not during training.

Of the 38 athlete deaths in American triathlons between 2003 and 2011, 30 occurred during the swim. None of those who died had any pre-existing health problems.

Professor Mike Tipton, who runs the Extreme Environments Laboratory in the University’s Department of Sport and Exercise Science, believes these deaths could be caused by a phenomenon called Autonomic Conflict. This is the first time this concept has been applied to competitive swimming.

Autonomic Conflict takes place when the body’s cold shock response and diving response are activated at the same time. The cold shock response speeds up the heart rate and causes hyperventilation, whereas the diving response slows the heart rate down to conserve oxygen.

In an online commentary written for the British Journal of Sports Medicine, Professor Tipton said: “Normally the two responses don’t happen at the same time, but when they do, the heart can go into abnormal rhythms, which can cause sudden cardiac death.”

The cold shock response can be caused by anxiety, competitiveness and the body entering cold water. The diving response is caused by facial wetting, extended breath holding and water entering the nasal passage. Although many of these factors are present to some degree during training, anxiety and competitiveness are more likely during the competition.

According to Professor Tipton, the confused mass swim in the competition, not present in training, can also require extended breath holds and cause more water to enter the nasal passage.

“The increase in these factors makes Autonomic Conflict more likely during the competition than in training,” he said.

Professor Tipton conducted earlier research with Professor Mike Shattock from King’s College London that linked submersion in cold water to Autonomic Conflict and sudden cardiac death. This included experiments using isolated rat hearts, the results of which were published in the Journal of Physiology last year. He has also conducted experiments involving helicopter underwater escape training. The results were published in the journal Aviation, Space and Environmental Medicine in 2010. He intends to do further research to determine how open swimming deaths could be prevented.

He said: “Possible solutions involve the prevention of swimmers coming together at the start or during the race, by introducing wave starts and longer distances before turns.”

Professor Jim Al-Khalili speaks at the opening of the Graduate School

graduate students.

The Graduate School will help develop researchers at the beginning of their studies through to those on the brink of a career, and expects to support at least 700 students a year.

Professor Al-Khalili said: “Having a graduate research culture is vitally important for universities and for students. It helps universities maintain a strong reputation for research and teaching, and gaining a PhD degree gives students a major boost when seeking employment.

“Every research student needs skills and training and courses and a Graduate School is well placed to provide this.”

Director of the Graduate School Darren Van Laar said: “This is a fantastic new space that will help us further develop a vibrant, curious and ambitious research culture within the University.

“During their studies research students are not only taught how to plan and design effective research projects and the advanced techniques necessary for research in their area but are also able to present their work to a critical panel of leading experts in the field, communicate their ideas to a general public and develop the management and leadership skills that will stay with them throughout their future career.

“These are the people who might go on to be leaders in their field, to write the must-read textbook in their subject, make breakthroughs in our understanding of natural forces in space. They could be tomorrow’s great inspirational teachers, develop new technologies or a theory that revolutionises the way business is conducted globally.”

The opening was attended by the University’s Vice-Chancellor John Craven, Deputy Vice-Chancellor Rebecca Bunting, Pro Vice-Chancellor David Arrell, Deans, heads of departments, research students and staff who supervise research.

Learning to read need not be an uphill battle

Children would find it much easier to learn to read and write if they were first taught how the English language works and what words mean, rather than trying to sound out words.

According to new research, English is so complex that relying on phonics – the common practice of teaching children to read by sounding out words – makes learning English much more difficult than it needs to be.

Dr Victoria Devonshire, of the Department of Psychology at the University of Portsmouth, trialled a new method of teaching reading and writing with 120 children aged five-seven years old and found the average reading age leapt by 14 months after just six months.

She said: “We were surprised at how compelling the results were. When children were taught to understand why English works the way it does we saw a leap in their ability to learn to read and write.

“The written word is about conveying meaning, not the sound of speech. Expecting children to just figure out the rules of our language is worryingly common and it isn’t helping them become as proficient and confident as young children in many other languages.”

Phonics focuses on the pronunciation of words and there is an exception to every rule. In contrast, morphology focuses on the meaning of words and has strong, consistent rules. For example, in the words ‘saying’, ‘said’ and ‘says’ the root word is ‘say’. And in ‘science’, ‘conscience’ and ‘conscious’ the root word is ‘sci’, which comes from the Latin, to know.

Dr Devonshire said teaching how the language is structured helps with children’s understanding and gives them a huge boost in terms of their reading, writing and spelling abilities. By knowing why words are spelled a certain way in many of our more complex or confusing spellings they learn much more quickly than if you expect children to just work that out for themselves.

She said: “Phonics is important and can be used to spell base or root words but you need to know about morphology to identify that part of the word.

“I’m not saying abandon phonics, I’m saying give the other elements the attention they need from the beginning of their formal literacy education, at the age of five years, to make sense of how our language works.”

Phonics is the most common method of teaching children to read and write. It is used in many countries and in many languages. It works well for children whose languages have a very close relationship between letters and sounds, including Finnish, Italian, Greek and Spanish but, according to the study,  it is not helping children learn English.

Finnish children learn to read with 90 per cent accuracy after just ten weeks of formal teaching, whereas English children take four to five years to reach the same standard in their own language.

Dr Devonshire argues that the problem for those learning English is it is ‘opaque’, with lots of different rules and exceptions and where many letters are not always pronounced the same way in every word, whereas most other European languages are ‘transparent’ and the rules or sounds of each letter are reliable and fixed.

She said: “About half of all the words in English are exceptions to the rules of phonics. English spelling has consistent rules but the way we pronounce words is inconsistent.

“That makes it hard for children taught using phonics – of course they will take longer to catch up with their European peers whose languages have consistent rules.”

The research is published in the journal Learning and Instruction.

Could your Christmas turkey be costing more than you think?

Britons will pour 15 million cups of roast turkey fat down the kitchen sink on Christmas Day, enough to nearly fill an Olympic swimming pool.

New research from the University of Portsmouth has shed light on what happens to this fat once it enters sewers and transforms into a hard, soapy material.

Scientists estimate removing fat, oil and grease from sewer pipes adds up to £50m a year to our household bills.

Dr John Williams said: “Millions will have stretched their finances to the maximum to pay for Christmas without realising they might be storing up hidden costs for later by pouring cooking fat down the kitchen sink.

“Householders who pour fat down the plughole might as well be pouring money down the drain.  Many people do not understand how a modern city runs, which is why sewers are abused.  Sewer systems are designed to use water to transport waste, so adding fat, oil and grease to that leads to sewer clogging and system failure.

“The costs of removing fat, oil and grease from the sewers are inevitably passed on to consumers.

“Nobody budgets for this, but we all pay the price.”

Sewer blockages also pose serious health risks through the danger of toilets backing up and sewer overflows.

One of the main reasons fat, oil and grease poured down kitchen sinks causes such huge problems underground is that kitchen sink plugholes are connected to sewers.  Once underground the oil transforms into a hard, chalky substance, a bit like soap, which is very hard to remove.

Due to the nature of this transformation it is also extremely difficult for water companies to point the finger at specific homes or businesses, such as takeaway restaurants and fast food outlets, which may regularly pour fat oil and grease down the sink.

Dr Williams said two separate mechanisms might be causing these substances to change and become hard and soapy.

The first one is the transformation over time of fatty acids from unsaturated to saturated forms, which is helped along by sewer micro-organisms.

The second process appears to be linked to the way fat, oil and grease deposits form in hard water areas. Increasing water hardness is associated with increased calcium levels in fats, oil and grease, making the residue harder to remove.

Understanding how the deposits are formed will allow experts to tailor the method they use when removing deposits from pipes, resulting in more efficient cleaning techniques.

This discovery comes hot on the heels of a video released by Southern Water which is designed as a fun way to remind customers not to pour fat down the drain.

The film is based on the song Twelve Days Of Christmas, and includes the message ‘Bag it and bin it’. It can be seen at www.youtube.com/user/SouthernWaterUK

Southern Water’s head of wastewater, Simon Parker, said, “We always notice an increase in fat in the sewers around this time of year as so many people are at home cooking Christmas dinners and more fat than normal ends up down the sink.”

Dr Maebh Harding

Researchers from the University of Portsmouth Business School have won funding to examine shared parenting and contact orders for children whose parents separate.

The research comes in the wake of fathers’ rights groups campaigning for more time with their children after divorce, and a mooted change in the law in favour of shared parenting becoming the norm.

Dr Maebh Harding and Dr Annika Newnham, of the School of Law, hope to help inform any change in government policy by examining how courts promote shared parenting in disputes between separated parents.

Dr Harding said: “Many assertions are currently made about what the courts are or aren’t doing, but it is vital that the coming changes to the Family Justice System are based on a clear understanding of the courts’ current work.”

The project won £106,000 funding from the Nuffield Foundation; the first grant won by the School of Law from the Foundation, whose research frequently informs government policy.

Drs Harding and Newnham will examine the data from 210 county court cases over a six-month period from five courts in England and Wales to see if there are any patterns of residence and contact orders. They will look at the relationship between the formal labels given to court orders and the actual allocation of children’s time between parents.

They will also interview stakeholders, including judges, barristers, solicitors and social workers, on their perceptions of how those orders are applied.

The researchers expect to report their findings in 2014.

Dr Harding said: “There is a shortage of empirical research in this area and the mooted presumption of shared parenting means parents rather than children are the focus of the proposed change in the law.

“There are also questions about what shared parenting means – courts, parents and politicians might mean entirely different things by the term ‘shared’.

“Under the Children Act 1989 the courts must look for the solution that is in that child’s best interests, and because every child and every family is different you can’t presume that one size will fit all.”

The Family Justice Review has cautioned the government against drifting towards shared parenting as a default position without research on what the courts already do to make shared parenting possible using the current legislative framework.

Dr Harding said: “People have very firm views on families and what should happen based on their own family experience, but those experiences reflect just a single family and do not necessarily apply to the thousands of families who go through divorce and custody battles every year.

“We are open minded. We simply don’t know what we will find, but we do think government policy should be informed by research  .”

Under the Children Act 1989 children’s best interests are paramount, but the test is flexible to allow for differences in different families. In 1989 shared residence was highly unusual and though it is growing in popularity it has no firm definition. It does mean alternating between two family homes but the amount of time spent at each is not necessarily equal.

Professor Bob Nichol

The Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation (ICG) has been awarded its first “Consolidated Grant” from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).

The grant, which covers the full range of research undertaken at ICG, is for a total of £1.72 million pounds over the next three years. It will help support a range of staff, visitors and researchers, as well as some of the travel and computing needs.

Professor Bob Nichol, Director of ICG and Principal Investigator of the grant said, “This grant represents a major achievement for the ICG in these tough times.”
“We will be able to fund research into all aspects of the universe, from the moment of creation to the complexities of galaxy formation and evolution. We also gain important postdoctoral support to exploit our membership of international experiments like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and the Dark Energy Survey (DES)”.

The grant provides core funding for ICG until April 2016.

A chick embryo in which the early, primitive but nonetheless pumping heart is stained in dark brown

Findings just published in the journal PLOS ONE are the first to show how cells at very early stages of development migrate and give rise to the different parts of the heart.

The research was carried out by biologists at the Universities of Portsmouth and East Anglia and was
funded by the British Heart Foundation.

Dr Susanne Dietrich, of the University of Portsmouth’s Department of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences, and her colleagues at UEA investigated chick embryos, between 12 and 14 hours after the eggs were laid.

Dr Dietrich said: “We found that some cells migrate into the area that forms the heart early, and these cells set up a primitive pump. But there are cells that arrive later, and they ensure that the fully functional four-chambered hearts develops.”

Dr Susanne Dietrich

Professor Andrea Münsterberg, of UEA, said: “We were researching chick embryos, but the process of heart development in humans is very similar.

“It takes a little longer in humans and happens in the third week of pregnancy. It is likely that what we learned in chick embryos can be applied to human development.

“The next step in our research will be to identify the factors, which guide these early heart cells to the right
place at the correct time.”

A significant number of babies are born with defects in their hearts and it is hoped that understanding some of the underlying causes may be helpful for affected families.

The paper, Fate mapping identifies the origin of SHF/AHF progenitors in the chick primitive streak, by Esther Camp (UEA), Susanne Dietrich (University of Portsmouth) and Andrea Münsterberg is available online at: http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0051948

This screenshot shows the devastation the Blitz brought to London

A new interactive map of London showing where German bombs landed over the course of eight months during World War II gives new meaning to the word Blitz.

The entire greater city from Egham in the west to Dartford in the east, and from Potters Bar in the north to Caterham in the south appears to be obliterated by the red bomb symbols used to illustrate where a dropped bomb landed.

The year-long mapping project, Jisc-funded Bomb Sight, which has just been launched, was devised by geographer Dr Kate Jones, of the University of Portsmouth, and colleagues.

She said: “When you look at these maps and see the proliferation of bombs dropped on the capital it does illustrate the meaning of the word Blitz, which comes from the German meaning lightening war.

“It seems astonishing that London survived the onslaught.

“The Bomb Sight project demonstrates the clustering together of lots of different data using the power of geography.”

Dr Jones chose to focus on the period of the most intensive bombing period in London during WWII, the Blitz. In that period, Germany’s Luftwaffe killed thousands and destroyed more than a million homes. The Blitz ended, and with it the fear of a Nazi invasion, in May, 1941 when it became apparent that Britain’s spirit would not be broken.

The Bomb Sight project uses a slightly longer time-frame for mapping what bombs fell where because it uses maps of the London WWII bomb census, taken between October 1940 and June 1941 and until now only available to view in the Reading Room at The National Archives.

The locations of the bombs have been combined with geo-located photographs from the Imperial War Museum and geo-located memories from the BBC’s WW2 People’s War Archive.

Users can manipulate the map and zoom into specific streets or boroughs as well as find out what type of bomb was dropped where.

Dr Jones won funding from Jisc to establish the project and has made the website and app available for public use to allow everyone, particularly students and teachers in schools and universities and citizen researchers to discover where the bombs fell and to explore memories and photographs from the period.

Paola Marchionni Jisc programme manager said: “Bomb Sight is a fantastic resource and it shows the power of what is possible by mashing up content from that resides in different places. The original Blitz maps have been scanned and geo-referenced thanks to the National Archive and testimonials from the BBC have been incorporated together with historical images from the Imperial War Museum to create an interactive teaching and learning resource that is similar to a map sat nav. There will be an augmented reality and mobile version available in December making the resource even more interactive.”

The website allows people to find out where and what sort of bombs fell in their area, and explore photos and stories from those involved or affected by the war.

The associated Android app also gives users an augmented reality view which allows users to point their phone at a street scene and, using the phone’s camera and GPS, the app will display the bombs that fell nearby.

Visit the website at http://bombsight.org/